Wednesday, June 11, 2008

The abortion law travesty

Justice Forrest Miller’s decision in the abortion case brought by Christchurch-based group Right to Life seems to confirm what has been blindingly obvious for decades – namely, that the Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion Act, or more specifically the application of it, is a travesty.

When Parliament passed the Act in 1977 after a long and agonised debate, the intention was that the rights of the mother would be balanced against those of the unborn child. MPs opposed to abortion didn’t want abortion on request and were satisfied they had achieved that goal.

But the legislation was quickly subverted. The counselling and certifying process that women were required to undergo before having an abortion became, in effect, a rubber stamp. Meanwhile the Abortion Supervisory Committee, created to ensure the Act worked as intended, looked the other way. The committee even admitted, in a breathtaking admission of its own failure, that thousands of women obtained abortions on “pseudo-legal” grounds – a reference to the ease with which women qualify on the grounds of risk to their mental health.

Under the sham certifying and counselling procedure, the abortion rate steadily increased year after year. From 2094 abortions in 1978, the first year after the Act was passed, the number rose inexorably and now stands at about 18,000.

Now Justice Miller, in the High Court, has said the statistics “give rise to powerful misgivings about the lawfulness of many abortions”. He notes that 98 percent of abortions are carried out on mental health grounds (actually 98.9 percent, according to the Abortion Supervisory Committee’s 2007 report) and that some certifying consultants approve every request – hardly what Parliament envisaged 30 years ago.

The painful irony here is that the Professor David Ferguson’s Christchurch Health and Development Study, which has tracked 1265 children born in Christchurch from 1977, found that at age 25, 42 percent of the post-abortive women in the study had experienced major depression in the past four years. The study, carried out by a respected academic who says he’s “pro-choice”, concluded that abortion might actually lead to a higher risk of mental illness among younger women.

Justice Miller’s judgment is a very significant victory for the anti-abortion movement, though at this stage it’s hard to know where it will lead. The judge seems to be proceeding cautiously – not surprisingly, given that it’s political dynamite – and has called for further submissions before he makes any declaration.

Anti- and pro-abortion groups agree on at least one thing. Both say the law, as it has been applied, is a farce, though their reasoning is very different. Pro-abortion groups say it’s absurd that women should have to jump through a series of legal hoops to get what they believe is their right. Anti-abortion activists say it’s farcical that Parliament should pass a law aimed at protecting the unborn child and then allow it to be flagrantly disregarded. I’m in the latter camp.

Both groups would like Parliament to revisit the abortion law, but with diametrically opposed aims in mind. And both probably agree on one other point: that few if any politicians will want this ugly, no-win issue to rear up again, least of all in election year. Like the Abortion Supervisory Committee, MPs have been looking the other way – even though it’s Parliament that is being mocked.

2 comments:

Interesting. Have you read "Freakonomics"? One chapter of the book looked at access to abortions in the US from 1973 and compared it to crime stats. Places that allowed easiest access to abortions saw the greatest decline in many categories of crime about 20 years later. Places that restricted access to abortions saw a decline to a lesser extent, roughly correlating with the ease or otherwise of having an abortion. The result seemed to indicate that the unwanted children of today stand a greater chance of being the criminals of tomorrow.

Rates of crime in many categories in NZ have begun to fall in the past 2-3 years, IIRC. Could see we even greater decreases in crime as we move beyond the 20 year anniversary of the passage of the present law?

The effort to show abortion is psychologically harmful is borrowed from anti-abortion groups in the U.S. It is just another tactic. For every study showing this, there are three showing the opposite, not to mention the harm done by forcing a woman to bear an unplanned, unwanted child. Watching men from these anti-abortion groups and religions pretend to care about women is simply nauseating. For information on these kinds of studies, see:http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/gpr/09/3/gpr090308.html

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.